SIBERIA

Siberia embraces about three-quarters of Russia’s territory and a twelfth of all land on earth. It covers as much land as the United States and Europe combined and yet has less people than the greater New York City area. If it had its own political boundaries it would be the largest country in the world. Siberia has been called the land "east of the sun." The name Siberia is derived from the Mongolian word “Sibir”, which means "Sleeping Land."

Technically, Siberia is the land east of the Ural Mountains and west of the Russian Far East. This area covers an area of 10 million square kilometers (4 million square miles, roughly two thirds of Russia) and extends 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) from east to west and encompasses eight time zones.

For many, Siberia means the entire 20 million square kilometers (7.5 million square miles) east of the Urals. This area is bordered by the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea to the north, the Pacific Ocean to east, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China to the south and the Urals and European Russia. It includes the low rolling Ural mountains and the high snowcapped Altai peaks. East of the Altai is Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake.

Siberia is so large that you an place the United States, Alaska and Europe (without Russia) within its borders you still have enough land left to engulf much of the Middle East. Most of the southern part is covered by steppe, forest and taiga. Much of the north is covered by tundra underlined by permafrost except along some the rivers where the forest penetrate father north.

Book: “In Siberia” by Colin Thubrons (Penguin); Journey Into Russia” by Lauren van der Post (Penguin, 1964).

Meaning and Ambiguity of Siberia

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Officially, there is no such place as Siberia. No political or territorial entity has Siberia as its name. In atlases, the word “Siberia” hovers across the northern third of Asia unconnected to any place in particular, as if designating a zone or a condition; it seems to show through like a watermark on the page. During Soviet times, revised maps erased the name entirely, in order to discourage Siberian regionalism. Despite this invisibility, one can assume that Siberia’s traditional status as a threat did not improve. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“A tiny fraction of the world’s population live in Siberia. About thirty-eight million Russians and native peoples inhabit that northern third of Asia. By contrast, the state of New Jersey, where I live, has nearly a quarter as many people on about .0015 as much land. For most people, Siberia is not the place itself but a figure of speech. In fashionable restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, Siberia is the section of less desirable tables given to customers whom the maître d’ does not especially like.

“Newspaper gossip columns take the word even more metaphorically. When an author writes a book about a Park Avenue apartment building, and the book offends some of the residents, and a neighbor who happens to be a friend of the author offers to throw him a book party in her apartment, and the people in the Park Avenue building hear about this plan, the party giver is risking “social Siberia,” one of them warns.

“In this respect (as in many others), Siberia and America are alike. Apart from their actual, physical selves, both exist as constructs, expressions of the mind. Once when I was in western Russia, a bottler of mineral water was showing my two Russian companions and me around his new dacha outside the city of Vologda. The time was late evening; darkness had fallen. The mineral-water bottler led us from room to room, throwing on all the lights and pointing out the amenities. When we got to the kitchen, he flipped the switch but the light did not go on. This seemed to upset him. He fooled with the switch, then hurried off and came back with a stepladder. Mounting it, he removed the glass globe from the overhead light and unscrewed the bulb. He climbed down, put globe and bulb on the counter, took a fresh bulb, and ascended again. He reached up and screwed the new bulb into the socket. After a few twists, the light came on. He turned to us and spread his arms wide, indicating the beams brightly filling the room. “Ahhh,” he said, triumphantly. “Amerika!”

Geography of Siberia

Siberia is made up of three parts: 1) the West Siberian Plain, 2) the Central Siberian Plateau and 3) mountains along the Pacific Ocean and the southern border with Mongolia and China. Most of Siberia is flat, with the exception of mountains near the Mongolian and Chinese border and in the northeast.

There are four ecological main zones: 1) the treeless tundra in the north; 2) the taiga forest; 3) a complex region of steppes and hill country; and 4) a region of mountains, with some very high permanently snow-capped peaks. These include the Altai mountains, the Sayan mountains and the Tuvan mountains.

Within Siberia are 53,000 rivers, more than a million lakes, and five of the world’s longest rivers: the Ob, the Irtysh, the Lena, the Yenisey and the Amur. Most of the great rivers in Siberia flow northward into the Arctic Ocean and are often clogged with ice. The exception is the Amur which flows into the Pacific. These rivers have traditionally been important transportation routes. Nearly two thirds of Siberia is underlined by permafrost. Lakes move up to three meters a year as summer melting of the of the permafrost extends their shores.

Boundaries of Siberia

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Nobody has ever formally laid out the boundaries of the actual, physical Siberia. Rather, they were established by custom and accepted by general agreement. Siberia is, of course, huge. Three-fourths of Russia today is Siberia. Siberia takes up one-twelfth of all the land on earth. The United States from Maine to California stretches across four time zones; in Siberia there are eight. The continental United States plus most of Europe could fit inside it. Across the middle of Siberia, west to east for thousands of miles, runs the Russian taiga, the largest forest in the world. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

“To the east, about three thousand miles beyond the Urals, Siberia ends at the Pacific Ocean, in the form of the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Bering Sea. Since Soviet times, Russians have called this part of Siberia the Russian Far East.

“The Arctic Ocean borders Siberia on the north. West to east, its seas are the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the East Siberian Sea. For most of the year (though less consistently than before), this line is obscured under ice. The land here for as much as two hundred and fifty miles in from the sea is tundra—a treeless, mossy bog for the months of summer, a white near-wasteland otherwise.

“In the south, Siberia technically ends at the border between Russia and Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, although Siberian watersheds and landforms continue on into them. This region is mostly steppe. The steppes of Siberia are part of the great Eurasian steppe, which extends from almost the Pacific westward as far as the Danube. For more than two thousand years, the Eurasian steppe produced nomadic barbarians who descended upon and destroyed cultivated places beyond the steppe’s margins. The steppes were why China built the Great Wall. Out of the steppes in the thirteenth century came Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, civilization’s then worst nightmare, the wicked stepfathers of the Russian state and of its tsars and commissars.

“Sakhalin Island, which almost touches the Russian coast north of Japan, is considered part of Siberia. The island was a prison colony during tsarist times. Six hundred miles east of Sakhalin, the peninsula of Kamchatka descends from the Siberian mainland, dividing the Sea of Okhotsk from the Bering Sea. Kamchatka lies within the Pacific Rim’s “Ring of Fire” and has active volcanoes. Kamchatka’s Klyuchevskaya volcano, at fifteen thousand five hundred and eighty feet, is the highest point in Siberia. Among Russians, Kamchatka has served as a shorthand term for remoteness. Boris Pasternak’s memoir, “Safe Conduct,” says that for Russian schoolchildren the far back of the class where the worst students sat was called Kamchatka. When the teacher had not yet heard the correct answer, he would cry to the back bench, as a last resort, “To the rescue, Kamchatka!”

“The lines between regions and around continents of familiar Cold War maps having to do with nuclear war were angular and schematic... On the walls at think-tank strategy sessions and as illustrations for sobering magazine articles, these maps showed the arcs of nuclear missiles spanning the globe—theirs heading for us, ours heading for them. Almost all the missile arcs went over Siberia. In the Cold War, Siberia provided the “cold”; Siberia was the blankness in between, the space through which apocalypse flew.”

Permafrost and Forests of Siberia

Most of Siberia is covered by a spruce, fir and birch forest known as the taiga, the largest forest in the world. Larger than Amazonia, the taiga contains a forth of the world's timber reserves. Traveling through the region on the Trans-Siberian railroad you more or less see the same scenery every day for a week: forest mixed with farms established near the railroad. Siberia, the Russian Far East and Kamchatka were largely covered by glaciers during the last Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago.

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Because of the cold, a lot of central Siberia and most of the east lies under permafrost—ground permanently frozen, sometimes to more than a thousand meters down. Permafrost also covers all the tundra region. Agriculture on any large scale is impossible in the permafrost zone, though in more forgiving parts of it people have kitchen gardens, and greenhouse farming occasionally succeeds. Much of Siberia’s taiga rests on permafrost, implying a shaky future for the forest if the permafrost melts, and a shakier one, scientists say, for the earth’s atmospheric chemistry. Huge amounts of climate-changing methane would be released into the air. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“Cities and villages in the permafrost zone must have basic necessities brought in. Fuel comes in steel barrels that are about three feet high and hold fifty-three gallons. Around settled places these empty barrels are everywhere, sometimes littering the bare tundra surreally as far as you can see. In 1997, the Los Angeles Times estimated that in Chukotka, the part of farthest Siberia just across from Alaska, the Soviets had left behind about two million barrels, or about sixteen barrels for each person living there. Fewer people, and probably more barrels, are in Chukotka today.

Weather of Siberia

Winter-like weather sometimes extends for nine months of the year in many places. The coldest part of Siberia is the Central Plateau, where temperatures have dropped to -90 degrees F. There are sometimes violent snow storms.

Many visitors to Siberia in the summer find it warmer than they thought it would be. There's same areas that have -90 degrees F temperatures in the winter but also have 90 degrees F temperatures in the summer. Even so it is a good idea to be prepared for chilly temperatures and be ready for mosquitos that are so thick they are sometimes used as building material. During the short summer life takes advantage of the extended daylight and what little time it has to grow. Bears stuff themselves with berries, mosquito proliferate into clouds and grass grows up to a centimeters day.

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Another bad geographical break is Siberia’s continentality. The land simply stretches on and on; eventually you feel you’re in the farthest, extra, out-of-sight section of the parking lot, where no one in the history of civilization has ever bothered to go. Only on the sea can you travel as far and still be in apparently the same place. The deeper into Siberia, and the farther from the mitigating effect of temperate oceans, the harsher the climate’s extremes become. Summers in the interior of Siberia are hot, sometimes dry and dusty, sometimes hazy with smoke from taiga fires. In the winters, temperatures drop to the lowest on the planet outside Antarctica. In the city of Verkhoyansk, in northeast-central Siberia, the cold reaches minus 68 degrees centigrade (about minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit). When I mentioned this frequently noted Siberian fact to my friends and guides in St. Petersburg, they scoffed, as Russians tend to do. Then they said they knew of someplace in Siberia even colder.” [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

Animals in Siberia

Siberian wildlife includes sable, roe deer, reindeer, wild boar, marmots, pine martens, brown bear, elk (moose), maral (Siberia red deer). snow sheep, Siberian (Amur) tigers, wolves, deer and beaver. These animals tend to be scattered over a wide area. Birds include willow grouse, Siberia rubythroats, rock ptarmigans, Siberia jays, spotted woodpeckers, Arctic redbills and the Great grey owl. [Sources: Wilbur E. Garret, National Geographic, October 1988 ⌂]; Dean Conger, National Geographic, March 1967]

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: ““Travellers who crossed Siberia in the eighteenth century noted the remarkable animals they saw—elk “of monstrous size,” fierce aurochs, wild boars, wild horses and asses, flying squirrels in great numbers, foxes, hares, beavers, bears. Of the swans, cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks, bitterns, and other birds, one traveller wrote, “After sundown these manifold armies of winged creatures made such a terrific clamour that we could not even hear our own words.” Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swede captured by Peter the Great’s army at the Battle of Poltava, in 1709, and sent with other Swedish prisoners to Siberia, wrote that the region had six species of deer, including the great stag, the roe deer, the musk deer, the fallow deer, and the reindeer. He also mentioned a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks. About two hundred and ninety years later in Siberia, I saw few or none of these marvels, except in museums, where some of the specimens are facing a second extinction from moths and general disintegration. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“The main four-legged animal I encountered in Siberia was the cow. Little herds appear all the time, especially in western Siberia, grazing along the road or moving at twilight from the woods or the swamp into a glade. Siberian cows are skinnier than the ones in America, and longer-legged, often with muddy shins, and ribs showing. Some wear bells. Herders, usually not on horseback, follow them unhurriedly. The boys have motorman’s caps and sweaters with holes; the women, usually older, wear rubber boots, long trousers under their skirts, and scarves around their heads against the insects. Beef in Siberian stores is gristly, tough, and expensive. Siberian dairy products, however, are cheap and good. The butter and ice cream of Siberia are the best I’ve tasted anywhere.

Ural Mountains

Ural Mountains have been the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia and a crossroads of Russian history. Stretching from Kazakhstan to the fringes of the Arctic Kara Sea, the Urals lie almost exactly along the meridian of 60 degrees longitude and extend for about 2,000 kilometers (1,300 miles) from north to south and varies in width from about 50 kilometers (30 miles) in the north and 160 kilometers (100 miles) the south. At km 1777 on the Trans-Siberian Railroad there is white obelisk with "Europe" carved in Russian on one side and "Asia" carved on the other.

The eastern side of the Urals contains a lot of granite and igneous rock. The western side is primarily sandstone and limestones. A number of precious stones can be found in the southern part of the Urals, including emeralds. malachite, tourmaline, jasper and aquamarines. The highest peaks are in the north. Mount Narodnaya is the highest of all but is only 1884 meters (6,184 feet) high.

The northern Urals are covered in thick forests and home to relatively few people. The southern Urals are characterized by grassy slopes and fertile valleys. The middle Urals are a rolling platform that barely rises above 300 meters (1,000 feet). This region is rich in minerals and has been heavily industrialized. This is where you can find Yekaterinburg (formally Sverdlovsk), the largest city in the Urals.

Western and Eastern Siberia

Western Siberia has traditionally been defined as the area of land between the Ural Mountains and the Yenisey River. Much of it lies on the West Siberian Plain which is lower and slightly warmer than the higher Central Siberia Plain. The forests are dominated by pine, spruce and fir. The hardier larch dominates on other side of the Yenisey. The large industrial cities of Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kransoyarsk are on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Some of the most interesting area are in the Republic of Altay and Tuva near the Mongolian border.

Tuymen (km 2144 on the Trans-Siberian Railroad) is as the oldest city in Siberia and the regional capital of Russia's largest oblast. Founded in 1586 and home to 400,000 people, it is the administration area for rich in gas and oil fields in the area. There isn't much to see other than a Orthodox Christian monastery, the green-and white multi-domed Church of the Holy Sign and a fine arts museum. Rasputin was born and grew up in Pokrobskoe, a town about 30 miles from Tuyman on the Tura River.

Eastern Siberia is an roughly defined by the Yenisey River to the west, the Arctic Ocean to the north, Mongolia to the south and the Far East to the east. Covered by tundra in the north and taiga forest to the south, it is sparely populated area. Most people live along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway, Lake Baikal or the Lena River.

Rivers of Siberia

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “As a landmass, Siberia got some bad breaks geographically. The main rivers of Siberia are (west to east) the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena, and the Amur. I have seen each of these, and though the Mississippi may be mighty, they can make it look small. The fact that the tributary systems of these rivers interlock allowed adventurers in the seventeenth century to go by river from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean with only five portages. Seeking furs, these men had crossed all of Siberia in a hundred years, and built fortresses and founded cities along the way. In western Siberia, there are cities more than four hundred years old. Siberia’s rivers still serve as important north-south avenues for barge traffic and in the winter as ice highways for trucks. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“The problem with Siberia’s big rivers is the direction they flow. Most of Siberia’s rivers go north or join others that do, and their waters end up in the Arctic Ocean. Even the Amur, whose general inclination is to the northeast and whose destination is the Pacific, empties into the stormy Sea of Okhotsk. In the spring, north-flowing rivers thaw upstream while they’re still frozen at their mouths. This causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia, the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly seem to move at all. There the rivers run muddy; in eastern Siberia, with its real mountains and sharper drop to the Pacific, many of the rivers run clear. In general, then, much of Siberia drains poorly and is quite swampy. Of the mosquitoes, flies, and invisible biting insects I will say more later. They are a whole other story.

Ob River

Ob River (flowing northeast of Novosibirsk and Tomsk) is forth longest river in the world if you include its major tributary the Irtysh River. The westernmost of three great rivers of Asiatic Russia, it is over 5570 kilometers (3461 miles) long and is an important commercial waterway that transports goods back and forth between the Trans-Siberian Railway and the resource rich regions of northern Siberia. Since it is frozen over half the year activity on the river is concentrated mostly in the summer months.

The Ob and the Irtysh River begin in the Altay Mountains, a range located near where Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia all come together, and flow northward. Although the Ob and the Irtysh begin at points within a couple of hundred miles of one another the two rivers don't join until the Irytysh has traveled over 1,600 kilometers (1000 miles). Once the two rivers have dropped down out of the highlands the meander lazily through open steppes, then rich farmland, and meet in flat, swampy plains, where the width of river ranges between a half a kilometer and a kilometer and a half. The Ob then passes through fir and spruce forests of West Siberia, then through Arctic tundra before finally emptying into the Kara Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean.

The Ob is one of the great Asiatic Russian rivers (the Yenisey and the Lena are the other two). According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it has the longest estuary (550 miles long and up to 50 miles wide) and is widest river that freezes solid. The mouth of the river on the Arctic Ocean is ice free only a couple of months a year. Huge flood sometimes form in the spring when high waters fed by melting snow and ice meet still frozen section of the river.

The main city on the Ob is Novosibirsk. Parts of the Ob are very polluted and nearly void of life. At the mouth of the river so much land has been degraded by gas exploration that huge chunks of permafrost land have literally melted into the sea. [Source: Robert Paul Jordan, National Geographic, February 1978, ♬]

Yenisey River

Yenisey River is the largest river in Russia in terms of volume. Running northward through Siberia for 3,300 kilometers (2,050) miles, The Yenisey-Angara River system is the world sixth longest river system. It is only 25 kilometers shorter than the Ob.

The Yenisey originates in Tuva in the Altay mountains in Mongolia and flows through Krasnoyarsk and Yeniseysky into the Kara Sea an Arctic Ocean. It's tributary the Angara flows out of the Lake Baikal. The Yenisey has been polluted by waste from plutonium processing plants.

During the summer ferries operate between Krasnoyarsk and northern destinations such as Dudinka and Vorontsovo, both about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) north of Krasnoyarsk. The down stream voyages takes about four days and the upstream trip back to Krasnoyarsk takes about six days. It is possible to fly one way and travel by boat the other.

The boats leave every two to four days, and are usually not full but you may have trouble getting a ticket in the class you want. The boats stop in Yeniseysk (413 km north of Krasnoyarsk), Bakhat (1023 km) and Igarka (1744 m). Dudinka is a seagoing port at the mouth of Yenisey. It is the capital of the Yaymar (Dolgan-Nenets) Autonomous District.

Lena River

Lena River begins in the mountains east of Lake Baikal and empties into the Arctic Ocean 4,400 kilometers (2,734 miles) later. One of the longest rivers in the world, it flows through taiga, bogs and tundra and some of the remotest and coldest parts of Siberia, where temperatures routinely drop to -70 degrees F in the winter.

The Lena is a major transportation route in central Siberia. It was first explored in the 17th century by Cossack fur hunters, who built stockade towns and subdued local people such as the Yakuts and Evenks

The Lena is frozen up to eight months of the year river, sometimes becoming solid ice from top to bottom. In early May the river goes through an awesome transformation, changing from a frozen lake into a raging torrent in a matter of weeks. Water that was frozen all winter is unleashed. The plains flood and huge block of ice are carried in a currents that uproots trees and erodes the river banks. This torrent reaches its peak in June when 65 more times water enter the Arctic Ocean than in April.

Ust-Kut (between Bratsk and Lake Baikal on the BAM railway) is a port on the Lena River with 70,000 people. Founded in 1631, is a jumping off point for trips on the Lena River, There isn't much to see in the city itself other than a shipbuilding works, museum and mud baths.

Cruising on Lena River is possible during July and Agist on paddlewheel steamship ferries that take five days to travel the 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) from Ust' Kut to Yakutsk, with stops in the major towns of Kirensky, with some charming colorful wooden houses, and Olekminsk. There are hardly any roads in this area. The only other way to get to Yakutsk is by air. The price on the sleeping quarters vary from $40 for an 8-berth-cabin to $106 for the a two-berth, 1st class cabin.

There are also hydrofoils that leave daily or every other day from Ust-Kut and head as far as Zhigalo, Vitim and Peleduy, which are about 12 hours away. The cost varies from $25 to $50.

Swamps of Siberia

Large swaths of Siberia are swampy, and this partly the result of its great rivers. Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “As a landmass, Siberia got some bad breaks geographically. The main rivers of Siberia are (west to east) the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena, and the Amur. I have seen each of these, and though the Mississippi may be mighty, they can make it look small. The fact that the tributary systems of these rivers interlock allowed adventurers in the seventeenth century to go by river from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean with only five portages. Seeking furs, these men had crossed all of Siberia in a hundred years, and built fortresses and founded cities along the way. In western Siberia, there are cities more than four hundred years old. Siberia’s rivers still serve as important north-south avenues for barge traffic and in the winter as ice highways for trucks. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“Eleven days from St. Petersburg, Sergei Lunev, Volodya Chumak, and I were well into the swampy flatlands of western Siberia. The country’s swampiness did not manifest itself in great expanses of water with reeds and trees in it, like the Florida Everglades. There were wide rivers and reedy places, but also birch groves and hills and yellow fields. The way you could tell you were in the swamp was, first, that the ground became impassably soggy if you walked at all far in any direction; and, second, by the mosquitoes.

Towns and Infrastructure in Siberia

Many Siberian towns began as Cossack frontier outposts. Today they are often very charming: filled with colorful old wooden houses, more street vendors than stores, and fur-hatted peasant carrying belongings on mules and horse-drawn sleds.

Most of Siberia's 30 million people are concentrated in the towns along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the great Siberian rivers and the mining and oil towns in the north that exploit some of the largest deposits of oil, natural gas, diamonds and gold in the world. Of these people only a small percentage are from the 30 or so ethnic groups that indigenous to Siberia.

The human settlements not along the Trans-Siberian railroad are small villages reach by rivers or unpaved roads that become impassible quagmires in the spring. Although Siberia takes up three quarters of Russia’s land area it has only a fifth of the country’s roads. The top soil is poor for farming.

Science and Siberia

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: “Geologists have always liked Siberia, especially its eastern part, where a lot is going on with the earth. Well into eastern Siberia—to a north-south range of mountains roughly paralleling the Lena River Valley—you are still in North America, tectonically speaking. The North American Plate, sliding westward, meets the Eurasian Plate there, while to the south the Amursky and the Okhotsky Plates complicate the collision by inserting themselves from that direction. All this plate motion causes seismic activity and an influx of seismologists. Eastern Siberia is among the most important places for seismic studies in the world. [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010) ]

“Paleontologists come to Siberia not for dinosaur fossils, which are not found nearly as often as in the Mongolian territory to the south, but for more recent fossils, of prehistoric bison, mammoths, rhinos, and other species that lived fifteen thousand to ten thousand years ago. The Siberian-mammoth finds alone have been a bonanza, some of them not fossils but the actual creatures themselves, still frozen and almost intact, or mummified in frozen sediments. In the nineteenth century, discoveries of mammoth remains were so common that for a while mammoth ivory became a major export of Siberia.

“To astronomers, Siberia provides the advantage of skies largely untroubled by light pollution and, in some places, cloud-free for more than two hundred days a year. Looking up at the clarity of the night in Siberia, you feel that you are in the sky yourself. Never in my life had I seen so many satellites and shooting stars.

Resources of Siberia

Siberia is rich in mineral, energy and timber resources. One government official said that mineral wealth of Siberia is so great the "reserves are measured in billions of tons." Around half for Russia's hard currency come from the sale of Siberian natural resources. Covering nearly all of Siberia of south of the Arctic Circle, the taiga is the largest forest in the world and contains a forth of the world's timber reserves. You could stick all the world's rain forests in the 15 million square kilometers (6 million square miles) of forested land in Siberia.

Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker: Siberia’s “natural resources, though hard to get at, are amazing. Its coal reserves, centered in the Kuznetsk Basin mining region, in south-central Siberia, are some of the largest in the world. The Kuznetsk Basin is also rich in iron ore, a combination that made this region Russia’s armory. Siberia has minerals like cobalt, zinc, copper, lead, tin, and mercury in great abundance; in Norilsk, the second-largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle, the Soviets dug the world’s largest nickel mine. The diamond mines at Mirny, near the Vilyui River, are second only to South Africa’s. Siberia has supplied the Russian treasury with silver and gold since tsarist times; during the nineteen-thirties, the Kolyma region of eastern Siberia produced, by means of the cruellest mines in history, about half the gold then being mined in the world. Russia has some of the world’s largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas. A lot of those reserves are in Siberia.” [Source: Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 3, 2009, Frazier is author of “Travels in Siberia” (2010)]

Siberia contains almost 20 percent of the world's gold and silver, and about a third of its iron. As much as 20 percent of Siberia is believed to contain oil and gas. Once the areas is completely explored, it could produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. Siberia also contains 80 percent of Russia's coal reserves and 27 percent of its electrical energy. The largest coal fields are in the Kuzbass region. Most the oil and natural gas reserves are located in Tyumen region north of the Siberian Plain, near the Arctic Ocean and the Ural Mountains. Most of the diamonds in the Central Plateau and the gold is in the west near the Pacific Ocean.

The Soviets expended a great deal of time, energy and money exploiting resources in Siberia — arguably more than the resources were worth. At one time it cost three times as much to extract and transport timber as the timber was worth. For natural gas, extraction costs were five times higher than the gas was for in Moscow. Large amounts of energy are necessary just to maintain the company and provide heat in the winter.

To develop Siberia’s resources grand infrastructure projects were planned, and in some cases built. Huge dams were built on the Angara and Yenisei rivers to supply energy for aluminum smelters and paper mills. The BAM railway, which parallels much of the Trans-Siberia Railway but is further north, was built. Plans that didn't make it off the drawing boards included building dams near the Arctic to flood Central Siberia and using nuclear bombs to build massive canals to link major rivers.

Republics of Siberia

Of the five republics located east of the Urals in Asian Russia, four — Buryatia, Gorno-Altay, Khakassia, and Tyva — extend along Russia's southern border with Mongolia. The fifth, Sakha (formerly Yakutia), is Russia's largest subnational jurisdiction and the possessor of a large and varied supply of valuable natural resources. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]

The Republic of Buryatia, formerly the Buryat ASSR, occupies 351,300 square kilometers along the eastern shore of Lake Baikal and along the north-central border of Mongolia. In 1989 the Buryats constituted only about 24 percent of the republic's population; Russians made up about 70 percent. The total Buryat population of the Soviet Union in the 1980s was about 390,000, with about 150,000 living in the adjacent oblasts of Chita and Irkutsk. In 1994 the population of the republic was 1.1 million, of which more than one-third lived in the capital city, Ulan-Ude. Buryatia possesses rich mineral resources, notably bauxite, coal, gold, iron, rare earth minerals, uranium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, and tungsten. Livestock raising, fur farming, hunting, and fishing are important economic pursuits of the indigenous population. The main industries derive from coal extraction, timber harvesting, and engineering.

Gorno-Altay was established in 1922 as the Oirot Autonomous Oblast, for the Mongol people of that name. In 1948 the region was renamed the Gorno-Altay Autonomous Oblast. Redesignated a republic in 1992, the region took its present name — the Republic of Gorno-Altay, or simply Altay (the vernacular term omits gorno , which means mountainous in Russian) — in that year. Occupying 92,600 square kilometers on the north slope of the Altay Range on the northeast border of Kazakstan, Gorno-Altay had a population in 1995 of 200,000, of whom 60 percent were Russian and 31 percent Altay. About 83 percent of Russia's total Altay population lives in the Republic of Gorno-Altay. The economy of Gorno-Altay is primarily agricultural, supported mainly by livestock raising in the hillsides and valleys that dominate the republic's landscape. Gold and other precious and nonprecious minerals — especially the rare earth minerals tantalum and cesium — support a small mining industry, and Gorno-Altay possesses rich coniferous forests. The main industries, mostly based on local resources, are the manufacture of clothing, footwear, and foods, and the processing of chemicals and minerals. The capital of the republic is Gorno-Altaysk.

Khakassia, an autonomous oblast that was redesignated an autonomous republic in 1992, is located about 1,000 kilometers west of Lake Baikal on the upper Yenisey River. Before the arrival of the first Russians in the seventeenth century, Khakassia was a regional power in Siberia, based on commercial links with the khanates of Central Asia and with the Chinese Empire. The sparsely populated republic (total population in 1995 was about 600,000) occupies 61,900 square kilometers of hilly terrain at the far northwestern end of the Altay Range. Russians now constitute nearly 80 percent of the population of Khakassia, although in 1989 more than three-quarters of oblast residents spoke Khakass. The Khakass population is 11 percent of the total. The republic produces timber, copper, iron ore, gold, molybdenum, and tungsten. The capital of Khakassia is Abakan.

Sakha, whose name was changed from Yakutia in 1994, is by far the largest of the republics in size. It occupies about 3.1 million square kilometers that stretch from Russia's Arctic shores in the north to within 500 kilometers of the Chinese border in the south, and from the longitude of the Taymyr Peninsula in the west to within 400 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean in the east. Sakha was annexed by the Russian Empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. Russians slowly populated the valley of the Lena River, which flows northward through the heart of Sakha. In the nineteenth century, most of the nomadic Yakuts adopted an agricultural lifestyle.

Formed as the Yakut Autonomous Republic in 1922, Sakha had a population of 1.1 million in 1994, of which 50 percent were Russian, 33 percent Yakut, 7 percent Ukrainian, and 2 percent Tatar. Climatic conditions preclude agriculture in most of Sakha. Where agriculture is possible, the main crops are potatoes, oats, rye, and vegetables. The republic's economy is supported mainly by its extensive mineral deposits, which include gold, diamonds, silver, tin, coal, and natural gas. Sakha produces most of Russia's diamonds, and natural gas deposits are thought to be large. The capital of Sakha is Yakutsk.

Tyva was called the Tuva ASSR until the new Russian constitution recognized Tyva, the regional form of the name, in 1993. The republic occupies 170,500 square kilometers on the border of Mongolia, directly east of Gorno-Altay. After being part of the Chinese Empire for 150 years and existing as the independent state of Tannu Tuva between 1921 and 1944, Tyva voluntarily joined the Soviet Union in 1944 and became an autonomous oblast. It became an autonomous republic in 1961. Tyva is mainly an agricultural region with only five cities and a predominantly rural population. The main agricultural activity is cattle raising, and fur is an important product. Gold, cobalt, and asbestos are mined, and the republic has extensive hydroelectric resources. The capital is Kyzyl.

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Text Sources: “Encyclopedia of World Cultures: Russia and Eurasia, China”, edited by Paul Friedrich and Norma Diamond (C.K. Hall & Company, Boston); New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, U.S. government, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated May 2020